Saturday, April 28, 2007

...and so we march

I read the following poem in the March 2007 issue of The Sun magazine and it stopped me dead in my tracks. “Basic” appeared originally in The Dumbbell Nebula (Heyday Books, 2000), by Steve Kowit. It appears again here with very kind permission of the author.

“Basic”by Steve Kowit

The first thing that they do is shave your head& scream into your face until you dropthe pleasant fiction that had been your life.More quickly than you would have guessedyou learn obedience: to shut your mouth&amp; do what you are told; that you surviveby virtue of compliance, shutting down.When they scream, “Drop for twenty,” then you drop.If, wobbly from lack of sleep,you’re told to sit up half the night & stripyour M-1 down, that’s what you do. You strip it down.The only insubordination’s in your eyes, which can’taccept the order not to close. Your combat bootskept so compulsively spit-shinedyou see your face in both hard toes – skinnedto the scalp, pathetically distorted,not unrecognizable but not quite you – a selfthat marches dutifully through sleet & has perfectedthe low crawl.One gray morning in the second weekof basic training, lacing up his boots,that shy, phlegmatic, red-haired boy who bunkedabove me whispered,“Steve,I don’t believe I’m gonna make it…”“No way, man! You’re doing fine! Hey, look, c’mon,we’re late,”& shrugged him off to race out just in timeto make formation in the mistof that Kentucky morning.- He was right. He didn’t. He took a razor blade that night,& crawling underneath the barracks slashed his throat.What little of myself I saved in thereI saved by tiny gestures of defiance:Instead of screaming, Kill, I’d plunge my bayonetInto that dummy screaming, Quill…Nil…At rifle drill I’d hum the Internationale& fire fifty feet above the target. I kept Dexedrinesin my fatigues. Took heart from the seditious drolleryof Sergeant May, that LA homeboywith the black goatee, all hip panache & grace:that bop salute and smartass version of left face.& sometimes from his cadre room at night, the wailingblues of Ray Charles drifted through the barracks,& I’d lie there in the dark, awake – rememberingthat other life that I had left behind.& it was Sergeant May & Ray Charles& Dexedrine that got me through.Had I been more courageous, less the terrified recruitwho did what he was told, I would have hung backwith that boy & argued with him,said whatever needed saying,or at least have heard him out, just listened, or let someoneknow, or somehow, god knows, saved him.But I wasn’t. & I didn’t.I was just a kid myself.For all my revolutionary rhetoric, I shut my eyes& ears when shutting of the eyes & ears was politic.When they said strip your M-1 down, I stripped it down.When they said march, I marched.